Please Continue To Hold

Thanks ever so much for submitting, the editors of the Carolina Quarterly said. Can you continue to wait for a response?

According to their submission policy, the literary journal will not accept simultaneous submissions. In other words, if you wish to submit your short story to them, you are not supposed to submit it to other journals at the same time.

I asked after a short story submission a few months back, but the submission was made a year previously and I thought that the packet was lost in the mail and the journal never received it. How wrong I was. The manuscript was in a slush pile of enormous proportions, so swamped were the editors. They had yet to get to it, sorry, but if I wanted to withdraw and try my luck elsewhere, just drop a line.

Of course, I was submitting the story to other places during the year, prepared to withdraw the submission if the folks at the University of North Carolina accepted it by some off chance. Why not let it ride and see how things played out?

Just the other day, a new type of rejection arrived, with an additional .02 postage courtesy of the university. It wasn't a no, it wasn't a yes.....

Rather like being put on hold, waiting for the next available customer service representative, only to be told that you've waited entirely too long so please call back. The slip of paper in the SASE stated that the editors could not get to the manuscript in a timely fashion. They simply were too overwhelmed with other submissions to read it at all. Please resubmit in September....cross that off. Make it January of 2008. Send it again, won't you? And get back in the queue?

Thanks for the offer, but I don't submit to journals that require exclusive submissions. Tie up a story for over a year and limit the chances of getting published? I felt too guilty skirting the submission rules, Carolina Quarterly, and I'm a believer in casting a wide net.